If you want a Behind The Email alternative in 2026 that accepts more than an email address, OSINTsearch is the one we would use: 20 searches a week on the free plan as of September 14, 2026, JSON, CSV and PDF export included, and one account that takes a username, an email or a phone number. Behind The Email is the cheaper tool per lookup by a wide margin, $14.99 a month for 100 email searches a day, and it is built for lead enrichment by email. The rest is the arithmetic, the free tiers, and what each tool puts in a real result.
Sources: both vendors' public pages, read on September 14, 2026, and two OSINTsearch exports of ours from September 5, 2026, a free-plan run on the dictionary handle cia (329 profiles) and an email run on one address (14 profiles). We build Revealer.US.
What is Behind The Email?
Behind The Email is an email-only lookup pitched as "Professional OSINT for lead research and verification." The hero promises to "Turn any email into a complete profile", and the three use cases on the home page are "Cold Email Research", "Lead Generation" and "OSINT Research".
The API's single search endpoint takes an email; there is no phone, name or username input on the site or in the spec as of September 14, 2026. The API exposes 19 provider modules (LinkedIn, Microsoft Teams, Google, TikTok, GitHub and a data-breach module among them), and the home page logo strip shows 37 services. The sample report leads with a LinkedIn block, then Microsoft Teams, employment history, a Google Maps profile, a "Data Breach Exposure" block with breach names and years, education, TikTok, Google Maps reviews, a "Registered Accounts" count and GitHub.
Public domain records show the domain registered on November 15, 2025, so the product is under a year old as of September 2026. The site makes no record-count or update-cadence claim; its accuracy statement is a policy, not a score: "we do not produce false positives."
Behind The Email pricing vs OSINTsearch pricing in 2026
Quoted from each vendor's pricing page in USD, both read on September 14, 2026: Behind The Email from behindtheemail.com/pricing, OSINTsearch from the OSINTsearch pricing page. Behind The Email's annual figures are from the page's own plan data.
| Behind The Email | OSINTsearch | |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Masked previews; daily count not published | $0, 20 search units a week, exports included (PDF evidence only), breach counts and years only |
| Entry | Plus, $14.99 a month, 100 searches a day; "No API Access", "No Data Breach Results", no bulk, no reports | Starter, $20 a month, 50 a week; partial breach records; AI summaries in PDF (separate allowance) |
| Middle | Pro, $29.99 a month, 200 a day; adds API access and "Data Breach Results" | Pro, $49.99 a month, 500 a week; full breach records at 5 units a reveal; deep search depths 1 to 4 |
| Upper | Business, $99.99 a month, 1,000 a day; adds bulk search and PDF reports | None between Pro and Enterprise |
| Top | Enterprise, custom, "Unlimited searches" | Enterprise, custom, unlimited, REST API and whitelisted IPs |
| Annual | $143.99, $287.99 and $959.99 a year ($12.00, $24.00 and $80.00 a month equivalent) | $199 Starter and $499 Pro ($16.58 and $41.58 a month equivalent) |
| Quota reset | Daily: "wait for the next day for your usage to reset" | Monday 00:00 UTC, no rollover |
| Refund | "non-refundable except as expressly stated in these Terms" | Full refund on request within 7 calendar days of the initial purchase, subject to its refund policy |
On the OSINTsearch side, a search costs 1 unit and a breach reveal 5; when you run out, "Searches are refused until the next reset, and nothing is charged." The gate to check before you pay is the API: "The REST API and whitelisted IPs are on Enterprise only". One dated caveat: the pricing page read 20 free units a week on September 14, 2026, while the site's own September 5 blog posts still say 15; we quote the pricing page, and the OSINTsearch free plan post covers the earlier number.
Cost per search at full use: Behind The Email is cheaper
The arithmetic, with the assumption stated: every allowance used, monthly billing, a 30-day month for daily quotas and 52 weeks spread across 12 months for weekly ones.
| Plan | Monthly price | Searches a month at full use | Cost per search |
|---|---|---|---|
| Behind The Email Plus | $14.99 | 3,000 | $0.005 |
| Behind The Email Pro | $29.99 | 6,000 | $0.005 |
| Behind The Email Business | $99.99 | 30,000 | $0.003 |
| OSINTsearch Free | $0 | 86.67 | $0 |
| OSINTsearch Starter | $20 | 216.67 | $0.092 |
| OSINTsearch Pro | $49.99 | 2,166.67 | $0.023 |
At $14.99 for up to about 3,000 lookups a month, that is half a cent a search. OSINTsearch's own figure for Pro is "$0.023 per search at full use", more than four times that, and Starter is $0.092. For a lead list enriched by email, hundreds a day, Behind The Email wins on price.
At the lowest volumes the order flips. At 20 searches a week, Behind The Email Plus works out to about $0.17 a search and OSINTsearch Free to $0; at 50 a week, Plus is about $0.07 and Starter $0.092, close enough that the decision comes down to what a search returns and what you can start it from.
Behind The Email free tier vs OSINTsearch free plan
Behind The Email's free search is a preview: the terms describe "anonymous searches subject to daily limits" and list "Masked or full profile previews" as a tier-dependent feature; the daily number is not published. The example page's upgrade line lists "names, profile links, work history, data breaches, and more" as what a plan shows.
OSINTsearch's free plan reads, on its pricing page, "20 search units every week. Available profile details and exports included." The FAQ says every account "can export JSON, CSV and PDF reports without spending search credits." Breach data on Free is "counts and years, not individual records".
Our cia export of September 5, 2026 ran on the free plan, so it shows what "available profile details" held. It listed 329 profiles across 317 distinct services, and 328 of them carried a profile link. Display names filled on 291 rows, user ids on 221, avatar links on 213, real account creation dates on 160 (oldest 2002, newest 2026), bios on 100 and locations on 51. The tool-page FAQ hedges that free results "may show a preview or more detailed results", so we quote the pricing page and the export above. Run your own handle on the OSINTsearch username search; it costs nothing.
OSINTsearch vs Behind The Email: three inputs instead of one
Behind The Email takes an email. OSINTsearch takes a username, an email or a phone number from the same dashboard. The homepage lists 761 endpoints per username scan as of September 14, 2026; its blog posts dated September 5, 2026 put the email sweep at 203 modules and the phone sweep at 24.
An email search on osintsearch.org returns handles where a platform exposes one, and the blog describes the pivot running both ways: the local part of an address into the username sweep, or a bare username against the mail providers that hold a live mailbox for it. Behind The Email's report lists usernames it finds, but there is no username search on the same site to feed them into.
The OSINTsearch email modules are also held to a policy the blog calls silence: "a check must read the platform's answer without sending the address anything", so the address owner gets no reset mail or login code. Our email OSINT investigation workflow covers chaining one input into the next.
What an OSINTsearch email search returned on one address
One address we searched on September 5, 2026 came back registered on 14 services, from Adobe and Dropbox to Chess.com and Snapchat. We print counts only, and the file does not record the plan tier.
| Field | Rows filled, of 14 |
|---|---|
| Profile URL | 13 |
| Raw source payload | 13 |
| Email echoed back as registered | 11 |
| Username | 4 |
| Display name | 4 |
| Avatar link | 3 |
| Bio | 2 |
| Masked recovery phone | 1 |
| Platform user id | 1 |
| Account creation date | 1 |
The identity block rated a probable name at 0.07 from a single source, listed the searched address as the probable email from 11 sources, held 2 username variants and set platforms_agreeing at 14.
For "who is this sender and where do they work", Behind The Email's LinkedIn-first report is the better fit. For "which accounts share this address, and what handle do they use", the 14-row export with 4 handles and a masked phone is the better start, and those 4 rows can be pivoted into a username sweep on the same account.
Username variants, former handles and account-state flags
The cia export shows the parts of a row that a lead-research tool does not need and an investigator does. The identity block listed 8 username variants. The base handle cia was backed by 318 source rows across 307 distinct modules; four variants were handle-shaped (cia, cia.eth, CIA_, 3026) and four were display-name strings from single platforms, which we do not print. Probable name and probable location each sat at a confidence of 0.01, the tool's way of saying a dictionary handle does not resolve to one person. That low number is the feature.
Two platforms, Steam and Instagram, returned a former username, one each, in a former_usernames column. The raw payloads carried a ban or account-status key on 42 platforms; scanning every status-style key, not only banned and deleted, 2 were real positives (ActBlue reported the account deleted, Lichess reported it disabled). Behind The Email's documented API schema has no confidence score and, as far as we can find, no former-username field. Our OSINTsearch review goes deeper on the row schema.
Refunds and the fine print
OSINTsearch offers "a full refund within 7 calendar days of your initial purchase", first purchase only, then no prorated refunds. Behind The Email's terms make fees "non-refundable except as expressly stated in these Terms", with any refund at its discretion. For a tool you have not used, that window is worth something: if a week on Starter does not return the rows you needed, the refund can be requested before the 7 days are up, subject to the eligibility and anti-abuse conditions in the refund policy.
Both carry an FCRA disclaimer: Behind The Email's terms say it "is not a consumer reporting agency", and the OSINTsearch pricing page says "Not a consumer reporting agency. Not for FCRA-covered decisions." Neither is a background check.
On removal, Behind The Email is self-service on its claim page: enter the address, click the emailed link, and the profile "will no longer appear in search results" within "a few hours".
Which one for which reader
| You are | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Enriching a lead list by email, hundreds a day | Behind The Email Pro or Business | 200 to 1,000 searches a day at half a cent or less; bulk and PDF on Business |
| Verifying a sender's employer before you reply | Behind The Email | LinkedIn, Microsoft Teams and Google Maps blocks lead the report |
| Checking your own handles and addresses a few times a month | OSINTsearch Free | 20 searches a week, exports included, $0 |
| Starting from a handle as often as from an address | OSINTsearch Starter or Pro | Username, email and phone accepted; 761 username endpoints |
| Needing breach records, not just counts | OSINTsearch Pro, or Behind The Email Pro | 5 units a reveal on OSINTsearch Pro; "Data Breach Results" from $29.99 on Behind The Email |
| Needing an API key this week | Behind The Email Pro | API from $29.99; the OSINTsearch API is Enterprise only |
If you are in the top two rows, or need an API key this week, use Behind The Email. Everyone else gets more from OSINTsearch, starting on Free. Our email OSINT tools compared roundup places both against Epieos, osint.industries and EmailOSINT, and OSINTsearch vs Epieos is the companion head-to-head.
Revealer is not a consumer reporting agency. Its data may not be used for employment, tenant, credit, or insurance eligibility decisions.
The short version
Behind The Email is an email-only lookup for lead research: $14.99 a month for 100 searches a day, breach results and API from $29.99, bulk and PDF from $99.99, free searches masked with a daily limit the site does not publish, fees non-refundable except at its discretion, as of September 2026. At full use that is half a cent a search. OSINTsearch is the Behind The Email alternative we would use for anything that starts with a question rather than a spreadsheet: 20 searches a week free with JSON, CSV and PDF export, and username, email and phone from the same dashboard. The export adds a confidence-scored identity block, former handles in a column of their own and account-state flags in the raw payloads, and the first purchase carries a 7-day refund window. Run one address and one handle on Free before you pay anyone.
Frequently asked questions
Is OSINTsearch a good Behind The Email alternative? For anything that starts from a handle or needs the row schema, yes. Free runs 20 searches a week as of September 14, 2026 with JSON, CSV and PDF export, so run your own address and handle there before deciding. For lead enrichment by email at volume, no: Behind The Email's 100 to 1,000 searches a day, half a cent or less each at full use, is the better fit.
How much does Behind The Email cost in 2026? As of September 2026, Plus is $14.99 a month for 100 searches a day, Pro is $29.99 for 200 a day with breach results and API access, and Business is $99.99 for 1,000 a day with bulk search and PDF reports. Annual billing lists at $143.99, $287.99 and $959.99 a year.
Is Behind The Email free? There are free searches, but they are masked: "Free searches hide some results." The site does not publish how many you get per day; the full names, links, work history and breach rows sit behind a paid plan. No card is needed until you buy a plan.
Does OSINTsearch search by email? Yes. Its reverse email lookup runs the 203 email modules its blog counted on September 5, 2026 and groups hits by platform. On one address we ran that day it returned 14 registrations, 4 with a handle and display name, 3 with an avatar and 1 with a masked recovery phone. Our best email OSINT tools list covers the wider field.
Does Behind The Email have an API? Behind The Email includes API access from Pro at $29.99 a month, as of September 2026, with no separate API price published. OSINTsearch puts its REST API and whitelisted IPs on Enterprise only; Starter and Pro are dashboard plans.